Insights from the PgCon 2013

PgCon 2013 was attended by 256 people across the globe. Attendees had the opportunity to enjoy tutorials, talks and an excellent unconference (this last deserves a special mention).

I lectured a talk related with Full text search using Sphinx and Postgres (you can find the slides at http://t.co/lgFoLq37EC, and all of the talks have been recorded). The quality of the talks in general was quite good, but I don’t want to repeat what you will find in other posts.

The unconference was attended quite late into the evening. You can find a schedule of it, as well as the minutes of some of the talks that happened (and others that didn’t also) here.

There was a special emphasis on the pluggable storage feature, albeit most agree that it will be a very difficult feature to implement in the near versions. A topic related to this, was the Foreign Data Wrapper enhancements.

Pluggable Storage engine was extended after. The main reason of why everybody agrees with this feature, is because an API for the storage will allow companies to collaborate with code and avoid forks to other projects.

There was a long discussion also about migrations on the hall, using pg_upgrade.

The features about replication were bi-directional and logical replication.

Full text search unconference discussion was pretty interesting. Oleg Bartunov and Alexander showed a really interesting work coming up for optimizing GIN indexes. According to their benchmarks, Postgres could improve the performance significantly.

There were a lot of discussion I missed, due the wide number of tracks and “hall spots”. But th emajority of attendees I heard agreed that the unconference was quite exciting and granted the possibility to bring many new ideas.